Bruce Handy on Culture

Q&A: Mitch Glazer on His Move to TV and the Fantasies of His Miami Childhood

Set in Miami Beach, in 1959, the new Starz series Magic Cityweaves an attention-getting narrative full of mobsters, Cuban exiles, straying wives, Frank Sinatra concerts, Judaism, and money—all centered on the mythical Miramar Playa hotel. The series is a creation of Mitch Glazer, the screenwriter (The Recruit, Scrooged) and occasional V.F. contributor, who, with Magic City, is returning to TV for the first time since a stint at Saturday Night Live in its early days. Mitch and I talked about Miami, memory, and, in keeping with the theme of this month’s V.F., the advantages of working in television over movies.

Bruce Handy: This is the first time you’ve really done dramatic TV, right? What it was like for you, switching from condensed screenplay rhythms to writing a long-form series?

Mitch Glazer: It was really different, not in any profound way, but it was a new way of looking at storytelling. In writing for movies you obviously want to resolve things and have a sense of completion at the end—in an ideal way. This was exactly the opposite. I wrote all eight of the shows, and each one, in theory, throws you into the next episode at the same time as telling a complete story in and of itself. It’s just a different muscle. It sounds insanely pretentious, I know, but I did look at the series as a novel. The episodes are kind of chapters in a novel with an overarching story, but each one is moving in and of itself.

That’s a perfect metaphor, because what’s so great about TV right now is that the best series really do unfold like novels. They’re absorbing in that same way.

I adapted two Dickens novels for film [A Christmas Carol, as Scrooged; and a 1998 Great Expectations with Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow]. This was probably much to Dickens’s horror, wherever he is. But in studying him and seeing that he was serialized quarterly, if not monthly, you realize the reason the plotting is so dense and satisfying, particularly in Great Expectations, is because he was doing it as if he were doing episodes of a TV show. It makes for great storytelling, and I know the actors love it because they can really dig into the characters and there isn’t the frantic quality of having to wrap everything up. They really do live and breathe—I love watching that over the course of a season, seeing how the actors settle into these roles. I don’t think it’s an accident that you're starting to see premium cable attracting a lot of movie people. It’s where you can tell these stories.

Since you grew up in Miami, to what extent does memory play a role in Magic City?

My father was an electrical engineer and designed all the lighting for the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc, the Deauville—those large midcentury hotels. I grew up in those hotels. So the show is insanely self-referential, and I do use my friend's older brother’s stories, because I was really young in 1959. Stories from my parents’ friends, things that I saw—it’s really specific to that. At the same time it’s my fantasy of what it was like. It’s all more glamorous in my childhood memory than it probably was at the time: men in white dinner jackets, women in furs, and all that.

It was an incredible period, not just aesthetically, which I love—that whole Rat Pack sensibility—but also politically. By 1961, Miami was the second largest C.I.A. station in the world behind Langley, because the Kennedys were so set on killing Castro. I felt like there was a deeper, more important story to tell, too. The combination of all that, because I knew the period and the place so well, it felt like something I could do and not get tired of.

The richness of backstage life of the hotel, the complexities of that world, it’s nicely delineated on the show. It feels very real.

For the hotel location we used the Deauville hotel, which is probably the last of the late-50s midcentury behemoths that hasn’t been restored out of recognition. The pool area we used as our exterior. We built the lobby [as a set] and the underwater bar and all that stuff. For example, the Atlantis Lounge was my favorite room on the set.

From PatrickMcMullan.com.

That’s the bar with the window where you can see girls swimming in the hotel pool, underwater?

Right, the circular window. The Eden Roc hotel used to have a tiny little porthole into the pool. Nothing as grand as ours. I keep thinking someone is going to steal it, some hotelier like Andre Balazs, because it’s our fantasy of what that underwater pool/bar would look like. I wanted it to be the kind of place where your mother tells you, when you’re nine years old, “Go get your father, he’s in the Atlantis Lounge,” and you go, “I’d rather not.” You don’t want to walk in there; it’s all the guys and hookers—adults. Carlos Barbosa, our production designer, is also an architect. Together, because I knew those rooms so well and he had studied that period of architecture, we could make this amazing composite.

The exterior of the pool is the hotel that I worked as a cabana boy in 1973. There was a moment when we were shooting there and they brought me into a room so I could write while we were shooting outside. I realized it was a room I used to hide in when I was 19 so I wouldn’t have to go back to work. It was in the bowels of the hotel, and I went, “Oh shit! I know this room.” It was a kind of weird full-circle thing.

Were any of the cabana boys getting the kind of action with female guests that the older son in the show is?

No, he’s kind of a fantasy. What I got was these little, tiny, intense women, like the grandmothers who would grab me and go, “My daughter’s coming down from Hofstra—ya gotta meet her.” I got those women. The Stevie Evans character is based on a good friend’s older brother who was that guy. The introduction of him, in the car being distracted by a girl [and a blow job] and driving into the water, did happen to him. I can only wish that was me.